Scientists Warn Corrupt US Nuclear Industry Sitting On A Nightmare Worse Than Fukushima

Katherine Frisk note: Headlines like this one make me angry. Not that the journalist Claire Bernish is not reporting the truth. She is.

What makes me angry is that we already have the tools at our disposal to solve problems like this one. But stupidity, selfishness and the ever-present greed stops it every time and instead we a presented with real “conspiracy theories ” in the media told as truth, while truth is derided as a “conspiracy theory.”

Two other blatant in you face ones are “Climate Change,”a hoax designed to relieve tax payers internationally of their tax revenue through that anomaly called “Carbon tax.” Not pollution tax, which is realistic, but “carbon tax,” an essential component in the earths atmosphere that stimulates the growth of all vegetation. If it was not for carbon dioxide , plants would not grow. We need to breathe out so that they can breathe in and live, and in turn breathe out and give us oxygen. It is a mutually beneficial system.

Pollution on the other hand, piles of garbage,plastic products from the petro- chemical industry when hemp which is biodegradable and easily produced and could be used instead, is ignored. No their solution is slap a “carbon tax”on anything and everything and drain economies dry of their tax revenues.

A world-wide water shortage is another. This is designed to hand over all water resources and put it into the hands of a few international corporations so that they can bottle it and charge you 100 times more. There is no water shortage. Simple solutions are rainwater tanks installed on every roof, desalinization plants which have advanced in technology and are cheap, affordable and highly efficient. And last but not least atmospheric water generators in areas of high humidity that are powered by solar. Considering that the largest concentration of populations are along coastal areas where both desalination plants ( where tax payers money should be going, instead of into the private corporate prison industry, the private corporate universal healthcare insurance industry and private corporate banking food stamp industry, ) and where there is usually high humidity, both these solutions are perfectly plausible. Atmospheric water generators come in many different sizes, from the household variety to ones that are used in large factories and even across large agricultural tracts. Nobody talks about this or promotes it.

Now let’s return to the headline: Scientists Warn Corrupt US Nuclear Industry Sitting On A Nightmare Worse Than Fukushima

There is a solution to this problem but nobody is talking about it, and every time I see articles that either report on Fukushima, leaking nuclear power stations in any country and the dangers of nuclear power, my blood starts to boil Here it is folks…… THE solution to this problem….. and please do me a favour…. tell everyone you know:

“Fast fission reactors solve the problem of depleted uranium nuclear fuel on the planet. They can ‘burn’ not only ‘classic’ uranium-235, (scarce and already coming to an end), but also uranium-238, which is abundant, and expands the world’s nuclear fuel capacity by an estimated 50 times.

Fuel for breeder reactors could even be made from nuclear waste, which from an ecological point of view is a priceless advantage.

The GKhK facility will be equipped with a unique dissolvent reactor that will break down nuclear waste containing plutonium and extract plutonium dioxide to be used in MOX-fuel production….

Also, while producing electric energy, breeder reactors actually generate more fissile material, and that one also can be used as nuclear fuel.

Humankind has already produced so much nuclear waste that it would take decades, if not hundreds of years to process and recycle it. As of now, the only light at the end of the tunnel is fast-neutron reactor technology…..

Overall, eight BN-1200 breeder reactors are expected to be constructed by 2030, which means that Russia is the only nation that is entering a new era of nuclear energy power generation – the closed nuclear fuel cycle, in other words truly clean and practically unlimited nuclear power generation.”

In the US they are still trying to figure out how to rob tax payers blind first , before rolling out with any new technology! They certainly do not want to waste all the profits that they have already made cleaning up their own mess!

A catastrophe far worse than Fukushima lurks in the United States, as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission used faulty data to estimate potentially ruinous risks of a nuclear-waste fire — one which could occur at any one of dozens of sites across the country.

“Published by researchers from Princeton University and the Union of Concerned Scientists,” the latter organization reports, “the article [in the May 26 issue of the journal Science] argues that NRC inaction leaves the public at high risk from fires in spent-nuclear-fuel cooling pools at reactor sites.

The pools — water-filled basins that store and cool used radioactive fuel rods — are so densely packed with nuclear waste that a fire could release enough radioactive material to contaminate an area twice the size of New Jersey. On average, radioactivity from such an accident could force approximately 8 million people to relocate and result in $2 trillion in damages.

Researchers warn darkly that the NRC’s recalcitrant refusal to enact crucial safety measures — including the use of dry casks to house contaminated waste — could have cataclysmic consequences for millions of people living near reactor sites.

And the NRC — a government entity unironically tasked with ensuring “the safe use of radioactive materials for beneficial civilian purposes while protecting people and the environment” — managed to shirk civic, environmental, and, arguably, ethical safety precautions by flatly dismissing viable potentialities.

“Using a biased regulatory analysis,” the Union of Concerned Scientists continues, “the agency excluded the possibility of an act of terrorism as well as the potential for damage from a fire beyond 50 miles of a plant. Failing to account for these and other factors led the NRC to significantly underestimate the destruction such a disaster could cause.”

Unsurprisingly — and nonetheless a damning testimony to egregiously skewed priorities — this inexcusable negligence through omission comes down to penny-pinching from the NRC’s slavish devotion to the nuclear power industry.

“The NRC has been pressured by the nuclear industry, directly and through Congress, to low-ball the potential consequences of a fire because of concerns that increased costs could result in shutting down more nuclear power plants,” paper co-author Frank von Hippel lamented, as quoted by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Von Hippel, a senior research physicist at Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security (SGS) at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, sharply admonished the public not to ignore these potential nuclear holocausts-in-waiting, adding,

Unfortunately, if there is no public outcry about this dangerous situation, the NRC will continue to bend to the industry’s wishes.

Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and study co-author, notedthe NRC has fecklessly permitted plant owners and operators “to pack spent fuel into cooling pools at much higher densities than they were originally designed to handle. This has greatly increased the risk to the public should a large earthquake or terrorist attack breach the liner of a spent fuel pool, causing the pool to rapidly lose its cooling water.

In such a scenario the spent fuel could heat up and catch fire within hours, releasing a large fraction of its highly radioactive contents. Since spent fuel pools are not enclosed in high-strength, leak-tight containment buildings, unlike the reactors themselves, much of this radioactive material could be readily discharged into the environment.

But even that disaster would have been exponentially worse, had cooling water slipped low enough to expose reactor cores to the air — which very nearly occurred in Unit 4.

Fukushima experienced core meltdowns in three of six reactors, birthing a pernicious nuclear morass which scientists now estimate could take at least another four decades to resolve. A lesson for the world, the Fukushima disaster also forced the entire industry to examine safety programs and regulations with a fine-toothed comb.

Tellingly, the NRC indeed deliberated mandating several indispensable reforms — such as requiring plant owners to transfer waste from spent fuel pools to dry casks after five years, or prohibiting packing cooling pools as densely as in the past — but, in cost-benefit analysis, decided against any of the proposals.

In fact, researchers point out that in the NRC analysis, the impotent government agency also surmised “there would be no consequences from radioactive contamination beyond 50 miles of a fire. It also assumed that all contaminated areas could be effectively cleaned up within a year. Both of these assumptions are inconsistent with experience after the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents.”

Lyman excoriated the NRC for its refusal to mandate relatively modest improvements — around $50 million per reactor pool — as well as the industry for rebuffing any suggestion of voluntary compliance with reforms found necessary in the study of the Fukushima fiasco.

“The consequences of a fire could be truly disastrous at densely packed pools, which typically contains much more cesium-137 — a long-lived, extremely hazardous radioactive isotope — than is present in reactor cores,” Lyman wrote.

My Princeton University co-authors have calculated, using sophisticated computer models, that a spent fuel pool fire at the Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Pennsylvania could heavily contaminate over 30,000 square miles with long-lived radioactivity and require the long-term relocation of nearly 20 million people, for average weather conditions. Depending on the wind direction and other factors, the plume could reach anywhere from Maine to Georgia.

My co-authors estimate the financial impact on the American economy of such contamination could reach $2 trillion: ten times the estimated $200 billion in damages caused by the release of radioactivity from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Von Hippel, Lyman, and Michael Schoeppner, a former postdoctoral researcher at Princeton’s SGS and third co-author of the paper, portend utterly disastrous consequences from the NRC’s astoundingly toothless — if not eminently reckless — stance with the nuclear power industry.

“In far too many instances, the NRC has used flawed analysis to justify inaction, leaving millions of Americans at risk of a radiological release that could contaminate their homes and destroy their livelihoods,” Lyman opined.

“It is time for the NRC to employ sound science and common-sense policy judgments in its decisionmaking process.”

Claire Bernish began writing as an independent, investigative journalist in 2015, with works published and republished around the world. Not one to hold back, Claire’s particular areas of interest include U.S. foreign policy, analysis of international affairs, and everything pertaining to transparency and thwarting censorship. To keep up with the latest uncensored news, follow her on Facebook or Twitter:@Subversive_Pen. This article first appeared here at The Free Thought Project.